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bloodycape

macrumors 65816
Original poster
Jun 18, 2005
1,373
0
California
My friend borrowed his friends ipod to put some of his music on her ipod video. Now the problem is he has a mac and her ipod is windows formated. Is there anyway to work around this to make his apple recognize the ipod with out a loss of data on her ipod? BTW he also has an ipod if that makes a difference or not set in manual mode. Thank you.
 
The Mac can read and write to Windows formatted iPod's. Any files you put on the windows formatted iPod will be available to both Mac and PC.

The only problems occur if the iPod is Mac formatted in which case the PC won't see it but as you have said, the iPod is Windows formatted and therefore will work on both platforms.

I have a Windows formatted iPod and go back and forth between my Mac and my friends' PCs with no problems whatsoever.
 
It is not the formating that you will have issues with, it is updating your iPod via any other computer with iTunes.
Apple likes to marry your iPod to one computer, call it a control device call it easy integration, whatever you may call it, it is pain for you to do something like this.
You can't use iTunes to update your iPod via a different computer other than your home computer.
There are plenty of software solutions out there that will allow you to update your iPod without you "home" computer/iTunes, check out iLounge's software section. Rather than go in to that you might just ask your friend to just put the music that that he has directly on to the drive. The music won't show up on the iPod, but whoever owns the iPod can add the music from the drive to there iTunes and then add it to the iPod.
 
pretentious said:
It is not the formating that you will have issues with, it is updating your iPod via any other computer with iTunes.
Apple likes to marry your iPod to one computer, call it a control device call it easy integration, whatever you may call it, it is pain for you to do something like this.
You can't use iTunes to update your iPod via a different computer other than your home computer.
There are plenty of software solutions out there that will allow you to update your iPod without you "home" computer/iTunes, check out iLounge's software section. Rather than go in to that you might just ask your friend to just put the music that that he has directly on to the drive. The music won't show up on the iPod, but whoever owns the iPod can add the music from the drive to there iTunes and then add it to the iPod.

No, that's wrong.

I have updated my iPod on 3 different computers.

The only limitation is that you update your iPod on the same platform as it is formatted.

This may be different if you auto-sync but in manual sync mode as long as you use a PC for windows formatted iPods and a Mac for Mac formatted iPods updates will be fine.

Unless you mean "auto-sync" when you say "update." In which case, yes, it can only be done on the one computer but then who actually auto-syncs? I find it frustrating as all get up.
 
Mac to PC

I recently reformatted my ipod on my mac and my PC won't read it. I get the usual not formated for this machine, blah, blah, blah. Is there a way I can format the ipod without dumping all my songs, formatting it PC and then reloading all the songs?
 
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